The pillowy perversion of Soft Opening’s name belies the heaviness of the quartets’ psyched-out drones. The Asheville outfit excel at synthesizing the best elements of stoner rock and doom metal, assimilating the genres’ strengths while escaping their inherent limitations. While it would be easy for the group to succumb to drone-y redundancy, they constantly push forward, aggressive textures met with equally resilient momentum, and there’s no better proof than this performance for Shuffle and Moog‘s AHA AVL series. Soft Opening sometimes sounds adrift, a result of restless exploration, not ineptitude. And though the group docks at familiar harbors, they spend most of their time orbiting the unknown. In this case, the journey is ultimately more interesting than the destination.

AHA AVL presents Soft Opening from Shuffle Magazine on Vimeo.